It came with 1GB of storage

When first launched, Gmail came with a whopping 1GB of storage! Compared to the 2MB to 4MB storage that came with competitors like Hotmail, Gmail didn’t even originally have a delete button. Users didn’t have to keep getting rid of emails to allow for more room in their inbox.

Gmail now comes with 15GB of storage.

Search option

Of course, with all the storage, it could have been quite easy for those early Gmail pioneers to get lost in all their emails. However, Gmail’s creator, Paul Buchheit, decided to put in a search tool that made looking for specific emails easy. This tool was not offered by the other major email services at the time.

Undo option

In 2009, Google engineer Yuzo Fujishima developed the ‘undo’ option which gives users 5 seconds to undo a sent email in case you changed your mind. Users can switch on the undo option in Gmail Labs under settings.

Encrypts mail

As of March 2014, Google has made the move to encrypt users’ emails. On a blog post detailing the change, Google said: "Every single email message you send or receive — 100 percent of them — is encrypted while moving internally. This ensures that your messages are safe not only when they move between you and Gmail’s servers, but also as they move between Google’s data centers — something we made a top priority after last summer’s revelations."

Categories

In 2013, Google made a visual update to Gmail, adding in separate tabs for incoming messages: Primary, Social, and Promotions. This gave clutter-haters less cause for a headache when sorting through all the spam we get nowadays.